Shocked!

i found out yesterday that the bird that i have been calling a rufous-sided towhee for years and years and years has been renamed! it is now called a spotted towhee. the name change isn't recent. the post about the name change i read was dated 1999! sorry birdie for calling you by the wrong name for so long. see cornell's great birding site for details. apparently those that get to rename animals decided that there were two races of rufous-sided towhees, with slight variations in their plumage. they decided that the west coast race would become the spotted towhee and the eastern race would become the eastern towhee. happy new name birdie!
i'd like someone to reclassify me and give me a new name too! i have had it with people writing to mr. terry all the time or calling up insisting to talk him! so what if i rename myself tere? that's ambiguous still but it doesn't gravitate towards the male gender. tere means hi, welcome, + good in estonian, looks slightly exotic, and it could still be pronounced the same way as my current indeterminate name. this is precisely why i wanted to give my children names that were not gender ambiguous.
(spotted towhee, gouache on japanese newspaper mounted on masonite, 2007)